Mombasa

In September I went to regional meetings in Mombasa, located on Kenya’s beautiful Indian Ocean coast. Over the years these meetings have taken place in other countries (Zimbabwe, Tanzania, NY, etc.) and this year I was quite happy to remain close to home – a one-hour flight from Nairobi.

the hotel

The hotel was located on the coast, next door to a hotel where we have stayed on a couple of occasions. At first glance it was a decent hotel but nothing special. However over the course of a couple days I began to realize that it was cooler than I thought. It was, without a doubt, the most ecofriendly hotel I’d ever stayed in. It was set up to harvest and recycle water, produce its own electricity from the sun and store it in an elaborate battery system, grow most of its own food with processes to avoid food waste, etc. Very cool.

At these meetings it’s always good to connect with my peers who do the same job in other countries around East Africa. We all seem to get along well and we pick up where we left off from the last time we were in the same room. We’ve obviously had some turnover throughout the past few years but the core group has been around for some time.

On the Tuesday evening we were treated to an evening excursion on a boat in the waters around Mombasa. It’s something I’d never done before and I wasn’t sure what to expect except that it was going to be on an old, wooden dhow boat. I was happy to find out that lobster was one of the options, grilled right on the ship. The trip lasted a little over a couple hours. Good music. Full moon. Perfect weather. Really a nice evening.

The week consisted of the usual onslaught of meetings with very little personal time. To make matters worse, the pool closed at 6pm making it basically unusable to us in the evening hours. As a result, by week’s end I had not touched the pool nor the beach as I boarded the taxi to return to the airport. I suppose it’s sad to spend so many days in such a beautiful place without much of an opportunity to take advantage of it (I did hit the gym a couple times). Maybe next time.